Today marks the first appearance one of three new characters being introduced to the Ginger Meggs universe in 2019: A young Australian boy named Rahul Jayasinha.

Rahul’s father was born in India, met his wife in Sri Lanka and moved to Australia to start their own medical practice. Now both Australian citizens, they had Rahul ten years after moving to Australia, making him a dinki di Aussie! He’s just moved house and so has just started at Ginger’s school.

Rahul loves nothing more than getting out in the sun and playing cricket — and giving Ginger a run for his money! He’s a little bit taller than the other boys, and can run faster than Tiger Kelly on a rampage.

The first appearance of Rahul occurs at the end of today’s Sunday strip, the second of a three-part continuation after Ginger is forced to stay in his bedroom and finish his homework before he’s allowed to go and play cricket with the boys.

Unfortunately, he arrives too late and the game is all wrapped up. He discovers they had invited the new kid to fill-in, but fast realised that he was so good, they wouldn’t mind having him on the team permanently!

Rahul will develop with the rest of the characters in the strip over time, and we’re excited to see him work his way into more storylines across the coming years. Every Aussie kid should be able to see themselves in the characters of Ginger Meggs. Stay tuned for our next introduction this year of a young indigenous Australian girl who plays music and gives the lads a run for their money on the sports field!

And of course, stay tuned for more adventures with the entire gang, every day at GoComics.com

A big note of thanks to my friend Dilruk Jayasinha for his advice on the character and his cultural heritage.

Introducing the first of 3 new faces moving to Ginger’s town in 2019... Penny Chieng! A whip-smart Malaysian Australian girl who gives Fitzzy a run for his money in all things academic.

Penny’s mum, a family lawyer, just got a new job in town and moved them in to a new place in Ginger’s neighbourhood. She’s starting at the school this week, and Minnie Peters will be showing her around.

When I started out as a cartoonist I absorbed as much literature about the art of cartooning as I could - I still do. But the most invaluable information I’ve found, to date, is talking to other cartoonists who are working now. Regarding gag cartoons, some of the most consistently helpful advice many have offered is “let the reader arrive at the punchline/joke themselves”. So, ‘don’t spoon-feed the joke to the reader and condescend.’

If they get it, they get it. If they don’t, they don’t. Sometimes it needs to be re-written or re-drawn, other times it just isn’t their cup of tea, or the reference doesn’t resonate with them, or a thousand other reasons (including “it’s just not that funny”). But never make it too obvious what the joke is right off the bat. Let the reader have to at least figure out what you’re trying to say.

Credit: Scott Dooley & Jason Chatfield

I still work very hard at tryin to make good cartoons that fall in that sweet spot between ‘this is too obscure’ and ‘this is too hand-holdy’. My friend and writing-partner Scott has a term that we use for when everything is literally labelled for the reader, like a giant steamship labelled the ‘S.S. Economy’ heading towards a big iceberg labelled ‘recession‘ or some other similarly obvious metaphor, like a politician holding a briefcase with their name on it. When we get to that point in having to make a joke work, we abandon it saying, “That’s a bit S.S”

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, you can hear more baffling musings like this in our weekly podcast called “Is There Something In This?” wherever you listen to podcasts.

FOOTNOTE: In defence of our dear editorial cartoonists, sometimes it’s essential to have to label things if the cartoons are being widely syndicated and in some cases, translated into different languages and cultures. Sometimes it’s even necessary to have a newspaper blowing in the composition somewhere with a headline relating to the story the cartoon is about, in case the newspaper running the cartoon hasn’t run that particular story… This could be alleviated by newspapers hiring more localised cartoonists to do cartoons about the area the newspaper services, but those days have sadly passed.

Get your head in the game, son!

A great trick I’ve learned for getting into the right mode is to psychologically ‘pregame’ before beginning any kind of creative work.

If I was to sit down and write an essay, then before typing a single word I would spend at least 15 minutes buried in some of the most inspiring and well-written essays ever written. Or, at least, writing from someone I enjoy reading.

If I was about to sit down to draw a cartoon, I would flip through the New Yorker and take a look at this week’s 16 or so cartoons that just ran, or flip through a cartoon collection book. It gets your mind well-and-truly in the mindset of that art form.

If I’m about to go out and do a series of comedy spots at night, I’ll switch gears by putting on a comedy special on the Netflix app on my phone, or looking at late night spots on Youtube.

Look at art that inspires you before you paint. Read writing that inspires you before you write. Watch comedy that inspires you before you perform. It sounds like simple advice, but it really is profoundly effective when you’re having trouble getting in the ‘mood’ to be creative.

I have to create every single day, whether I feel like it or not. Since I was 15 years old, I’ve always clipped out art that inspires me, or sparks off an idea or a mindset, and stuck it on my wall (or in my childhood days’, my wardrobe doors.) I used to think I would subconsciously absorb some of the great artists’ styles, but I’m not so sure about that.

These days I have art all around me in my studio (see above). If I’m about to draw up a rough for MAD, I’ll flip through the MAD 60 book, or a Sergio Aragonés or Don Martin collection. If I’m about to ink a New Yorker cartoon I might flip through some old Thurber, Addams or George Booth collections— or google other artists I’m enjoying right now and scroll through their work on Pinterest. My studio wall looks like a serial killer’s den, sure, and the art is now about 9 layers deep, but it does help kick my brain into gear every morning when it’s time to start work.

Monday night I was waiting for my late night spot at Broadway comedy club and my friend (and fellow comic) Ethan also had some time to kill, so we slipped out to an all-night diner across the street to write.

He was scribbling away, manic as ever, while I drew up a few cartoons to pitch to the New Yorker the next morning. I needed the right light to take photos of the drawings with the Adobe Scan app on my phone, so I had him hold up the drawings for me.

Yeah, he was real happy about it.

Anyway, while he was being nice and holding up the pictures for me he pitched an idea that I thought was pretty funny — he said, “What about a cartoon of Putin sitting all smug with a whole bunch of ‘I Voted” stickers plastered all over him.

Actually pretty funny, I thought. So I drew it up and pitched it to the New Yorker the next day. It would have been a nice little collaboration.

Before I left for Louisiana last Christmas, the Cartoon Editor of the New Yorker had recommended that if I were in New Orleans, I should make the trip out to Audubon Park and the nearby bookstore, Octavia Books. Sophie and I made a day of it, both snagging armfuls of weighty tomes and scuttling off to Audubon with a clandestine bottle of Chablis.

The first of my haul was John McPhee’s latest book on his vast experience as a writer, entitled Draft №4: On The Writing Process.

I was hooked from the very first word and was lamenting the inexorable conclusion awaiting me in the footnotes. I really couldn’t recommend this book highly enough. I often forget that writers aren’t just people who ‘can write’, but are people for whom writing is hard. They constantly strive for better than their last sentence.

But, to the title of this note;

A passage in the book struck me, not only due to its typical McPhee-isms — (details that were chosen very purposefully to illuminate the readers mind without saturating it. ie. leaving out the right bits.) — but because I’m the author and artist behind a legacy comic strip which has seen 5 separate artist/writers over 97 years.

The quote reads:

When I was quite young, I was inadvertently armored for a future with Roger Straus. My grandfather was a publisher. My uncle was a publisher. The house was the John C. Winston Company, “Book and Bible Publishers,” of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and on their list was the Silver Chief series, about a sled dog in the frozen north. That dog was my boyhood hero.

One day, I was saddened to see in a newspaper that Jack O’Brien, the author of those books, had died. A couple of years passed. I went into high school. The publishing company became Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and my uncle Bob’s office moved to New York. When I was visiting him there one day, a man arrived for an appointment, and Uncle Bob said, “John, meet Jack O’Brien, the author of Silver Chief.” I shook the author’s hand, which wasn’t very cold. After he had gone, I said, “Uncle Bob, I thought Jack O’Brien died.”

Uncle Bob said, “He did die. He died. Actually, we’ve had three or four Jack O’Briens. Let me tell you something, John. Authors are a dime a dozen. The dog is immortal.”

What a brilliant, concise way of summing up such a stark truth. In my case, perhaps, cartoonists are a dime a dozen. The kid is immortal.

Not since M*A*S*H* has an entire generation enjoyed a host of characters as genuinely funny as the people of Springfield.

The Simpsons happens to be the longest running sitcom in history and one of the most quoted television shows to boot. It can't be understated enough how difficult it is to keep a weekly show -not just a cartoon that has to be animated- but a prime time comedy show going for 25 consecutive seasons across more than two decades, and still be successful.

A lot of people will tell you The Simpsons 'lost it's mojo' in the early-to-mid 2000's for whatever personal reason, and they stopped watching. I can say with some sincerity, whatever they thought was lost, is back now. The Simpsons is funny, and it's better than ever.

I couldn't be more enamoured of an internationally syndicated comedic, satirical cartoon show that captures the zeitgeist of each decade each episode was written in. The whole shebang is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off, and with incredible consistency the writing and production team have done it so well.

I had the great pleasure of meeting one of The Simpsons' great Directors, David Silverman. Name one of your all-time favourite episodes you can remember and the odds are, he directed it.

David also took on the immense task of Directing the Simpsons Movie. I couldn't begin to imagine the scale of what he and the team at Fox had to work with, on top of putting out a new episode of the Simpsons every week.

We had a day to kill together after the NCS Reuben Awards weekend in Boston in 2011, so we walked around the city on foot. One of the great things about talking to David about the show is the passion he has for animation, and for cartooning in general. You can't work in the industry for as long as he has without loving every aspect of the process and its origins. He showed me classic Pogo strips and the artwork and odd vernacular in the old comics.

Every minute with cartoonists like David is a huge and invaluable lesson for young cartoonists, and I couldn't recommend coming to the Reubens and joining the National Cartoonists' Society enough for any working or up-and-coming cartoonist. If you're in Australia, the ACA is just as great a resource.

I think the biggest thing that strikes me about why the Simpsons work is the writing. Some of the best writers in television comedy have worked on the show, and many still do. It's become something of an institution, like the Tonight Show. If you want a glimpse into the mind of one of the Simpsons longest-contributing writers, take a look at Tom Gammill's Comic Strip on GoComics, The Doozies. Lord knows he doesn't promote it enough.

And now, courtesy of The Mirror, The 16 funniest newspaper headlines from The Simpsons...

THE single most commonly asked question I get about Ginger Meggs is: Who writes the gags/stories? The short answer is, I do.

The slightly longer answer is; Producing a daily comic strip (in my experience), is separated into three parts: 60% is writing, 20% is drawing (the fun bit), 20% is business and syndication.

The writing is the most time-consuming and difficult part of it. That’s not to say that getting syndicated isn’t difficult (heck, it’s near impossible these days!) but as far as time goes, you spend more time and mental energy coming up with new material day after day than anything else. It’s like a stand-up comedian not being able to get up on stage and do the same routine as he did yesterday. Every day.

It used to irk me that people would assume I just “drew” Ginger Meggs, but then I realised it was because often a comic strip cartoonist is referred to as “the artist for…” which of course would lead one to assume you just draw the strip, and someone else writes it. That setup is not uncommon (ie. Zits, Baby Blues, Wizard of Id) but it’s not how the majority of comic strip cartoonists do it.

I suppose it’s like anything- the more you do it, the better you get. I’m still a novice, but my background in writing editorial cartoons and stand-up comedy gave me a good grounding for writing a daily strip. It’s been a very steep learning curve, and I’m enjoying the experience. I hope to be doing it for a long time to come!

The first writer for Ginger Meggs was his creator, James C Bancks in 1921. He was followed by Ron Vivian in 1953, Lloyd Piper in 1973 and then my predecessor, James Kemsley in 1983. A full run-down of the Ginger Meggs history is available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_Meggs